Selling downloads of your film on your own part 6
So now that I have figured out how and where the film is going to be sold as a download... now I need to figure out what formats I'll be able to offer the film in without it being too much trouble...
So 4gb is the file size limit I have to work with... I know that I can encode a great quality 720p version of the film and keep the file under 4gb but I'm not so sure about the 1080p version... So last post I talked about how Apple is able to keep its 1080p files for 2 hour films under 4gb... now after digging a little deeper I found out that the low bitrates they are using will only allow good quality with sources have low noise... that is not much grain... not crazy gradients like fog and stuff 0_o
HSM is full of fog and dust so it doesn't allow itself to compression very well... I did a few encoding tests after getting some advice from a d00d at doom10.org
You'll get best results by having a clean, high quality source. Noise and grain reduce efficiency, but some amount of dither is needed to avoid banding. If the movie is very grainy, you'll need to consider denoising at least a bit because otherwise the noise will cause artifacts when encoded at too low bitrate.
I'd suggest starting with this set of parameters: --preset veryslow --tune film --level 4.1 --vbv-maxrate 40000 --vbv-bufsize 30000Use either 2-pass encoding or CRF (try and see what file size --crf 20 gives). Further restrictions may be needed if you need compatibility with specific devices that can't handle normal High Profile L4.1 streams.
Seems the free x264 codec is the best around... but yeh from my tests to get a decent 1080p of HSM in its unmodified state the file would be closer to 6gb than 4gb... I'll do some experiments with denoising to see if I can get the sizes down... but if I can't I don't think downloading two zip files for the 1080p is too much hassle...do you?
So a customer would buy the 1080p and get a link for two files HSM1080p_01.zip and HSM1080p_02.zip
Once they downloaded both all they would have to do is double click one of the files and then it would create HSM1080p.mp4 and that would be the movie file...
So the movie WOULD NOT be in two pieces... you just download two files that unzip and form the ONE movie file...
Doesn't seem too bad does it? I'm going to use separate files for the Movie and soundtrack and other extra stuff anyway... But you'll just make one purchase then you'll be emailed the different links...
For me that wouldn't be any trouble at all... BUT I am a geek ^ ^ If I included clearly written instructions I think it should be fine... what do you think?
If I was able to make the 1080p as two zip files I could make it uber high quality ^ ^ I'm sure the people that want the 1080p would appreciate the best quality rather than just good enough to be under 4gb's eh?
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